post # 400

Blogger says this is my 400th post since we moved. That's mildly exciting. I feel like I should write something pithy, and hope that its worthy of posterity, but I'm not. I'm going to write about one of my favorite poems. If you are not a poetry reader, I'll paraphrase and condense it for you:

Afternoon with Irish Cows (paraphrased)
By Billy Collins

Across the street from my house is a field.
Sometimes there are cows in it and later,
when I walk by the door again, they are gone.
Then, magically, I walk past the door again, and
hooray! they're back. They look so peaceful
there in the shade. It must be nice to be a cow.

Then, one day I was cutting an apple
in the kitchen. One of the cows
let out a loud, awful noise. I went to the
door and realized, "Wow. That cow mooed
pretty loud. That's cool.... And now
she's staring at me. Kinda creepy
to have a cow stare at you."

The end.

Now you can read the pithy version of the poem. Billy Collins really isn't that deep. It's other readers that make something deep about it, and try to be all intellectual and intimidate everybody (who just want to read poetry) with their silly ideas about the brevity of life, or the evils of animal husbandry or something. But really, Billy Collins heard a cow moo loudly. He thought it was cool and wrote a poem about it. That's it in my mind. I'm an MA-trust me and enjoy the poem...


Afternoon with Irish Cows
By Billy Collins

There were a few dozen who occupied the field
across the road from where we lived,
stepping all day from tuft to tuft,
their big heads down in the soft grass,
though I would sometimes pass a window
and look out to see the field suddenly empty
as if they had taken wing, flown off to another country.

Then later, I would open the blue front door,
and again the field would be full of their munching
or they would be lying down
on the black-and-white maps of their sides,
facing in all directions, waiting for rain.
How mysterious, how patient and dumbfounded
they appear in the long quiet of the afternoon.

But every once in a while, one of them
would let out a sound so phenomenal
that I would put down the paper
or the knife I was cutting an apple with
and walk across the road to the stone wall
to see which one of them was being torched
or pierced through the side with a long spear.

Yes, it sounded like pain until I could see
the noisy one, anchored there on all fours,
her neck outstretched, her bellowing head
laboring upward as she gave voice
to the rising, full-bodied cry
that began in the darkness of her belly
and echoed up through her bowed ribs into her gaping mouth.

Then I knew that she was only announcing
the large, unadulterated cowness of herself,
pouring out the ancient apologia of her kind
to all the green fields and the gray clouds,
to the limestone hills and the inlet of the blue bay,
while she regarded my head and shoulders
above the wall with one wild, shocking eye.